Top quarks are most often produced in pairs at hadron colliders. The reason of this fact is that the strong interaction, which produces most of the reactions between the projectiles, is flavor-blind, and it cannot create a single new flavor of quarks out of nothing. In other words, physical processes mediated by strong interactions conserve the quantum numbers describing the difference between the number of quarks and antiquarks of any given kind: U, D, C, S, T, and B.
When forests are logged, managed or selectively trimmed so they’ll be less susceptible to raging fires, there are usually huge piles of stumps, branches and other wood debris left laying on the ground. Now a group of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle is developing a portable technology to turn these waste piles into treasure troves by converting them into biochar; charcoal made from plant material that can be burned for energy or applied to soils, where it helps plants grow.
“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and achievement ” says a 2010 report in the journal Management Science.
Sometimes you set out to test for antibiotics but get a bonus; in this case, diphenhydramine, arsenic, and fluoxetine.
Yikes.
Mike McRae's Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs, and Bad Ideas is short, sweet, often humorous and to the point. It's also pithy and full of quote-worthy sentences:
"Since most of the face-like patterns Mary sees every day are indeed faces, her brain's gamble usually pays off. In addition, making the mistake of thinking there is the face of Jesus on her iron isn't costing her much (except a new iron. Nobody likes to do housework with the face of God)."
YiZRi LLC has unveiled VoiceSee, the world's first hands-free, eyes-free web navigation platform that uses mobile apps to read aloud recipes, digital newspapers and Wikipedia entries for the Android smartphone.
VoiceSee's flagship beta application, Culinary Pal, is a cooking web navigation mobile app that will follow your voice commands to search for recipes and choose the one you want. Sadie, the voice of VoiceSee, will then read aloud the ingredients list followed by preparation and cooking or baking instructions. She will pause at your command so you can finish each task before listening to the next one.
The anterior insular cortex is a small region of the brain, but it plays a big role in human self-awareness and in neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type, the von Economo neuron (VEN), is located there. For a long time, the VEN was assumed to be unique to humans, great apes, whales and elephants.
But scientists have recently discovered these brain cells in monkeys. Bring on the self-awareness and empathy? Not just yet.
Researchers writing in PNAS state they have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound, vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide, even generations earlier.
The findings put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture and may have implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited. They exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin and then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found the descendant rats were more anxious, more sensitive to stress, and had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.
I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter.
There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean sprouts they can make at their house. No one cares about how much butter is in a dish when they go to a restaurant because it is a night out, a special occasion. Calories are basically unimportant and taste remains supreme. We want to eat something prepared by someone who only cares what we think about its flavor.
Obviously the human body was not designed to eat at a restaurant every evening. If you do that, and you don't exercise, you are going to get fat.
I like to explain stuff so that people like you and me think “aha!”, and not, “this guy knows a lot; I better agree though I have no clue what he is talking about”. In this manner, let me again briefly introduce one of those deeply complex and hugely controversial topics that supposedly require big sophisticated words, and then, like I hope you slowly come to expect from me, present the solution in a way that is obvious and that we all could have thought about a long time ago (if the conclusions were not so damn uncomfortable that people simply refuse even if it is presented on a silver platter).
